The 'Good War' Myth of World War Two

The 'Good War' Myth of World War Two By Mark Weber

What were the American goals in World War II, and how successful was the US in achieving them?

In 1941 President Franklin Roosevelt, together with British prime minister Winston Churchill, issued a formal declaration of Allied war aims, the much-publicized “Atlantic Charter.” In it, the United States and Britain declared that they sought “no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned,” that they would “respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of governments under which they will live,” and that they would strive “to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them.”

It soon became apparent, though, that this solemn pledge of freedom and self-government for “all peoples” was little more than empty propaganda. This is hardly surprising, given that America’s two most important military allies in the war were Great Britain and the Soviet Union – that is, the world’s foremost imperialist power, and the world’s cruelest tyranny.

At the outbreak of war in 1939, Britain ruled over the largest colonial empire in history, holding more millions of people against their will than any regime before or since. This vast empire included what is now India , Pakistan , Bangladesh , Malaysia , Nigeria , Ghana , Kenya , Uganda , Tanzania , and South Africa .

America 's other great wartime ally, the Soviet Union, was, by any objective measure, the most tyrannical or oppressive regime of its time, and a vastly more cruel despotism than Hitler's Germany . As historians acknowledge, the victims of Soviet dictator Stalin greatly outnumber those who perished as a result of Hitler’s policies. Robert Conquest, a prominent scholar of twentieth century Russian history, estimates the number of those who lost their lives as a consequence of Stalin’s policies as “no fewer than 20 million.”

During the war the United States helped substantially to maintain Stalin’s tyranny, and to aid the Soviet Union in oppressing additional millions of Europeans, while also helping Britain to maintain or re-establish its imperial rule over many millions in Asia and Africa .

Paul Fussell, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who served in World War II as a US Army lieutenant, wrote in his acclaimed book Wartime that “the Allied war has been sanitized and romanticized almost beyond recognition by the sentimental, the loony patriotic, the ignorant and the bloodthirsty.” (more)